Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions.
The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
This is exactly my experience, wasted $60 trying to get it to make something. The founder sent an automated AI email about setting up a time to meet and go through it then ghosted me at the meeting time.
> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now.
Interesting that within an IC this is basically "solved", or at least properly automated with classical numeric techniques such as simulated annealing.
I would have thought there's a big opportunity in a mixed-technique approach, where you use AI to extract unstructured data from datasheets and then feed it into more deterministic tools.
I also note that it's very easy to waste more than $100 in electronics once you start actually manufacturing bad PCBs.
I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools.
Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!?
Maybe it's changed, I haven't been paying that much attention after bouncing off of this. I've gotten mild acceleration from using gptel-mode in emacs, manually adding references to context, and having models do various mechanical transformations on code. And I've even had some limited success writing tools for it to do LSP lookups.
tool_call is just a fancy wrapper to a black box that executes console commands. Said commands are now the actual backbone of all agentic AI, It feels like the linux people are incredibly vindicated in the single responsibility principle
It frustrates me too, it really feels like the next breakthrough will be when someone gets agents working "natively" with LSP on large code-bases.
Anthropic added LSP support to claude-code, but the current implementation is worse than useless, because any changes aren't reflected fast enough, so it's constantly working on outdated views / compilation caches, and it gets in a right muddle between its "internal" state / understanding in context, the real-world file, and the LSP.
If it could just leverage LSP to apply refactorings it would be amazing, but it feels like the LSP can't keep up, and I don't know if that's an LSP problem or a claude problem.
So we binned the LSP plugin and we're back to watching a machine find/replace, because while waiting on that is slower than LSP, it's a "Action => Wait" which the tooling understands, while LSP is "Possibly Wait for LSP to catch up => Action" which it doesn't understand nearly as well.
I suspect the LSP plugins also need better skills that pair with them so it reaches for them more often.
It hurts my soul to see it reach for find/replace to rename a class, complete with mistakes made in complex solutions where you might have name clashes in different namespaces. Something the LSP handles without problem, but can trip up an LLM.
I work in Unity and I got frustrated with Claude constantly doing gross bash/grep/awk/sed/grep nested loops that took forever that I finally described (and had Claude implement and install) a tool that could, in a single pass, gather all this info from a Unity forest of scenes at once and answer all the questions Claude ever wanted to ask about a Unity project in a single pass that takes 50ms instead of 10 30 second iterations. It still took a lot of coaching to get it to actually use this tool, but it seems like I’ve convinced it.
What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker?
In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?
Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but it's difficult to imagine they can be worse than the existing regime, which is embarassingly bad for the decades it's been around.
Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."
AI certainly is the shiny new hammer, and it is tempting to see the world as nails.
Traditional methods might not be perfect, but they also easily fit in the memory of even low power devices. Perhaps it isn't a problem worth burning a dollar of tokens for every spelling mistake.
The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word.
I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage.
The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to happen like that.
A few days ago someone on HN commented that a teammate uses Claude to search for text in files on their own computer. Buddy... There's Command-line Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster and then there's Command-line Tools Can Be ∞ Faster Than Your AI.
> nobody [wants to use AI] to augment already working solutions
Plenty of people do, but that only produces a blog post that will get you to the front page of HN. If you want VCs to drop $40M on your head, you need to pretend to reinvent the world.
Then, to further appease the rain gods, you need to sue the bloggers challenging your world-changing narrative. Which will, heh, drop you on the front page of HN.
Our community is, literally, eating itself at this point. There was a time when we actually took "make something people want" literally. Now it's just part of the fiction.
It is far from solved in IC, synthesis tools sometimes still do really stupid things and there's still quite a lot of hand-holding required to get to a working chip.
> After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic.
Is this common? When I try out new AI tools, even as person who is financially independent, I load up maybe 10-20 USD worth of tokens, and if I don't get anything working from that, I literally give up and don't continue trying. If it can't do anything useful like "place a simple component on the schematic" after ~10 USD of expenditure, is it really worth continue adding more money into the platform? Seems DOA in those cases.
I used company money on it. I was hoping I could massage it along enough to get a workable test fixture out of it. I wanted to put together a simple hardware-in-the-loop tester for a component of our product.
I tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.
All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost there, just one more token, bro" that makes it addictive.
That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation.
If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term.
Gambling addicts make all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations for why they are actually up, if you think about it. "Well, if you consider my entertainment, I'm actually up." "Well, if you think of all the drinks I got comped, I'm actually up." Even worse are the ones who talk about runs, "I was up $10,000 at one point." Nevermind they gave it all back and another $20k chasing that first $10k. At the end of the day, if they had just gone to the movies instead, they'd have more money on their pocket.
Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant". There will be arguments all day long about how these affairs are technically possible and quite lucrative if everything goes according to plan. But the reality is that vanishly few people are equipped to identify and stick to the right plan. Reality meeting theory.
I've told my developers they can use agentic coding if they want, but they must never mention it in the course of development. Not because I don't want to know, but because it's not going to change my evaluation of "their" work. If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care? But if it breaks the build or does something stupid and they don't understand it, it's going to be a bad day for them, whether they wrote it themselves or copied it out of StackOverflow or had Gemini do it.
Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.
I am actually up all the drinks I got comped in Vegas. I sit down at the penny slots and bet one penny one row until I get offered a free drink. I tip the server $3, bet two more pennies for good measure, get up, and walk out with the drink in my hand. I just got like a $3.10 Manhattan for walking around the strip, including tip, courtesy of some business that was low-key trying to scam me and deserves to have less money than they do.
If they cannot mention it how do you know that they have not taken up the offer?
I agree that people will rationalise being in a losing situation as a winning situation. That does not change the fact that winning situations can exist.
> I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
I literally did this yesterday with solid results using Codex CLI. I used xhigh thinking and gpt 5.5.
I had it use KiCad directly via cli rather than via MCP, and I did make Claude Opus review it's work after every round. I got what I think will be a working revision A in about 10 hours of tinkering spread over a few days.
> Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now.
Would some sort of constraint-solving algorithm help with that? Something like (but not necessarily) Cassowary[0]? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by placement though; I don't have much domain knowledge in PCBs / electronics.
I've written my own autoplacer/autorouter. Placement is where you put the components on the board, routing is how you shape the traces to interconnect them.
It does a pretty decent job on small hobby-project boards of ~40 components (which is my use case at the moment), and I'm working part-time in the background on scaling it further.
The resulting designs pass all the KiCad electrical and geometry checks. Granted, I've spent about a year working on this problem, and it's hard, but not that hard a problem, providing you can avoid falling off the exponential cliff by decomposing it into hierarchical subproblems.
Quick-and-dirty unsupervised whole-board synthesis from schematic takes about 5 minutes, longer if you want cleaner output with nicer-looking better-routed traces.
As others here have said, placing is the real problem to solve, and that's where the magic happens. Place the components right, and routing is a relatively easy loosely-coupled constraint programming problem, place them wrongly, and you will have to get used to seeing the word UNFEASIBLE in your log output.
As an electrical engineer who has tried to use it multiple times, I think Flux is an absolutely awful product. No surprise at all that they want to sweep details about their “intellectual property, commercial traction and user base” under the rug.
A number of years ago I was working on something professionally and there was a problem. Only about 1 in 5 boards assembled wouldn't crash the CPU. After much debugging it turned out one of the ICs had an open collector output and it wasn't loaded correctly with a pull up resistor. This caused a cascading failure, held the bus up when initialising the hardware which hit the WDT and reset the CPU over and over again.
If you aren't there designing the thing in the first place, you never read the datasheets, never drew the schematic, never placed the components and thus don't know where to look when something goes wrong. And it does go wrong. And then you're in deep shit.
I worry about people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't.
Vibe coding is certainly the main part of it. But another problem is how deep our software and hardware stacks are. There is too much information to retain to solve problems now.
Flux just got funding from Bain and others, and it feels like Adafruit was preparing a post about it. Maybe they contacted Flux to confirm some info and they freaked out?
I can't find in archive.org if they had a previous post about it.
Also, seems like there a good bunch of complains in Reddit about Flux and its billing...
Note that this is not related to Black Forest Labs Flux, the image synthesis models builders, and is instead related to a PCB AI authoring product called Flux.ai.
> Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration
Does anyone have some more context about what happened here? An uncharitable analogy might be that I misconfigured my front door by not locking it, which doesn't give someone the right to walk in and look around - but I have no idea what Adafruit is specifically being accused of doing.
It might be being suggested in that statement, but to me that reads that there's a potential opportunity there for a delayed AMA on this?
That if people were to email press@adafruit.com with a subject line (for example) of 'FLUX - AMA for later', these questions could be rounded up and the responses could then go onto a Adafruit blog page later, when and if applicable?
I have, and the article does not in any way address my question. You also seem to be a brand new user, so in case you're not aware, HN guidelines say to refrain from mentioning whether or not someone has read the link.
As a long time reader I keep wondering how it is more conductive to the discourse to comment without reading than to point that the answers might be in the article someone ignored.
Just reply with a quote from the article. They will understand they did not read carefully, and you can avoid the low-value 'read the article' snark (that might be false since often it is not actually in the article when somebody does that).
My question wasn't "how to handle that better". I hope it's okay to point it out :)
I would also argue it's not "often" the case someone asking the obvious question seemingly answered in the article had actually read it. It happens, surely, but it's not a rule of thumb.
That's too meta for a thread here anyways, I think.
It's an in-actionable "question" / comment. The rule does not claim one thing is better than the other. One is easily enforceable, the other is indemonstrable. If the point of this exchange is to better understand and use HN, the reason is because it is not hard to be constructive instead of throwing out non sequiturs.
And I didn't say it's '"often" the case someone asking the obvious question seemingly answered in the article had actually read it'. I said the person pointing it out while refusing to provide receipts or cordially engage is often wrong about what they think is obviously in the article. It's worthless noise regardless.
When you discover an exploit, only communicate with source (and pray they respond) or get sued. Seems like the position is customers and stakeholders shouldn't be allowed access to this information.
That's actually very common even with respected bug bounty programs. Communicating exploits to anyone else (let alone the general public) will at the very least make you ineligible for rewards.
It seems there's suspiciously little context available, yet here I also am commenting on a 'vaguepost'. I wonder if one day AI will be able to filter out vagueposts from my browser along with ragebait and curiosity gap headlines.
Best I can tell they've taken down whatever it was, but most likely flux left some ways to get data out of their system that shouldn't have been and Adafruit leveraged that. Could have been in a good way like exposing false claims of architecture or security, or a bad way like revealing proprietary information on how the platform worked or looking at other peoples' projects (more than just seeing they could do that). If the blog doesn't come back up, I'll kinda assume they did something bad. I don't have sources but I've heard adafruit isn't the sweetest fruit in the tree...
Not only did it burn a 100$ failing but it did so in a very untransparent way.
I bought a 20 dollar plan but they snuck a 100$ billed usage into the billing agreements next thing I know the agent as used the quote going in circles and my card is billed.
Never heard of Flux.ai before. It seems to be a 3D circuit designer with 'AI'.
Not sure what the issue between them and Adafruit is.
However, people over on Reddit¹ claim that Flux.ai is a little bit scummy. They push users into a beginner trial ($5/month) and then silently charge for usage per token - up to $100 per month.
Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Adafruit products, including footprints, symbols, datasheets, and simulation models"². I wonder whether they designed these themselves or whether they use existing ones. Could not easily find licenses info.
Why do we tolerate this bullying and misconduct from companies that harms us and progress overall? Is there really no solution in this day and age for harmful behavior and aggression and hostility like what it looks like Flux is doing here? I can't believe we don't have an answer, I think it's just that the bad guys are drowning us in noise and making it hard for us to identify the solutions where we band together a la David v Goliath against them.
>The letter further asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration
They vibe coded their system and it showed Adafruit something? Or showed some information with trivial prodding? Sounds like your average cross-tenant leak. Maybe showing more than intended or some caching issue. Many options some not really not fault of Adafruit.
Or someone found server.domain/path/subdirectory/resourceX and was like "shit, I was hoping to find resourceY but I can't find a link to it, I wonder if I just click in my address bar and change the X to a Y", and voila, resourceY is right there.
To some of us, this is elementary navigation. Like going up the stairs if the elevator is out. Often it's faster than waiting for the damn elevator, too.
To others, it's cybarrrr-criiiimeeee!!!!!!11111one
I don't know the details of the case, but what they worded there is a textbook unauthorized intrusion and a naïve teenager "the door was open" defense.
Mind you there can be nuances, but that quote is like saying "I took their stuff, but it was poking out of their pocket."
It is bit grey area. You are evaluating something. Do some basic checks. Actually end up seeing something you should not. You stop and tell them to fix it. They then silence you.
Now it is bit questionable should you check things like this during evaluation or not. Strict legal reading probably not. With reasonable customer relations you thank them and put it on top of the priority list. Unless they clearly enumerated everything they got their hands on or tried to run more real scans.
Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions.
The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
This is exactly my experience, wasted $60 trying to get it to make something. The founder sent an automated AI email about setting up a time to meet and go through it then ghosted me at the meeting time.
> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now.
Interesting that within an IC this is basically "solved", or at least properly automated with classical numeric techniques such as simulated annealing.
I would have thought there's a big opportunity in a mixed-technique approach, where you use AI to extract unstructured data from datasheets and then feed it into more deterministic tools.
I also note that it's very easy to waste more than $100 in electronics once you start actually manufacturing bad PCBs.
> mixed-technique approach
I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions.
Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.
I've been frustrated with Copilot in this regard.
I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools.
Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!?
Maybe it's changed, I haven't been paying that much attention after bouncing off of this. I've gotten mild acceleration from using gptel-mode in emacs, manually adding references to context, and having models do various mechanical transformations on code. And I've even had some limited success writing tools for it to do LSP lookups.
tool_call is just a fancy wrapper to a black box that executes console commands. Said commands are now the actual backbone of all agentic AI, It feels like the linux people are incredibly vindicated in the single responsibility principle
It frustrates me too, it really feels like the next breakthrough will be when someone gets agents working "natively" with LSP on large code-bases.
Anthropic added LSP support to claude-code, but the current implementation is worse than useless, because any changes aren't reflected fast enough, so it's constantly working on outdated views / compilation caches, and it gets in a right muddle between its "internal" state / understanding in context, the real-world file, and the LSP.
If it could just leverage LSP to apply refactorings it would be amazing, but it feels like the LSP can't keep up, and I don't know if that's an LSP problem or a claude problem.
So we binned the LSP plugin and we're back to watching a machine find/replace, because while waiting on that is slower than LSP, it's a "Action => Wait" which the tooling understands, while LSP is "Possibly Wait for LSP to catch up => Action" which it doesn't understand nearly as well.
I suspect the LSP plugins also need better skills that pair with them so it reaches for them more often.
It hurts my soul to see it reach for find/replace to rename a class, complete with mistakes made in complex solutions where you might have name clashes in different namespaces. Something the LSP handles without problem, but can trip up an LLM.
I work in Unity and I got frustrated with Claude constantly doing gross bash/grep/awk/sed/grep nested loops that took forever that I finally described (and had Claude implement and install) a tool that could, in a single pass, gather all this info from a Unity forest of scenes at once and answer all the questions Claude ever wanted to ask about a Unity project in a single pass that takes 50ms instead of 10 30 second iterations. It still took a lot of coaching to get it to actually use this tool, but it seems like I’ve convinced it.
I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker.
I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window.
I swear that so many AI usecases I see are: "I did not have the skill or realize that you can write a program for this obvious logic".
I guess that works if you aren't a programmer or don't want to hire somebody, but then wtf would I pay for your service or product?
What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker?
In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?
AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.
Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but it's difficult to imagine they can be worse than the existing regime, which is embarassingly bad for the decades it's been around.
Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."
AI certainly is the shiny new hammer, and it is tempting to see the world as nails.
Traditional methods might not be perfect, but they also easily fit in the memory of even low power devices. Perhaps it isn't a problem worth burning a dollar of tokens for every spelling mistake.
The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word.
I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all.
> What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker?
Don't do a stupid thing like that in the first place.
> In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections.
I doubt it, but if that's true, run a normal spell checker, and then give the output to your LLM to filter.
> what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions,
About a billionfold improvement in compute efficiency, and a lower error rate.
> and how can it be achieved?
10 seconds of actual thought.
Something something bitter lesson blah blah
I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage.
The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to happen like that.
A few days ago someone on HN commented that a teammate uses Claude to search for text in files on their own computer. Buddy... There's Command-line Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster and then there's Command-line Tools Can Be ∞ Faster Than Your AI.
> nobody [wants to use AI] to augment already working solutions
Plenty of people do, but that only produces a blog post that will get you to the front page of HN. If you want VCs to drop $40M on your head, you need to pretend to reinvent the world.
Then, to further appease the rain gods, you need to sue the bloggers challenging your world-changing narrative. Which will, heh, drop you on the front page of HN.
Our community is, literally, eating itself at this point. There was a time when we actually took "make something people want" literally. Now it's just part of the fiction.
It is far from solved in IC, synthesis tools sometimes still do really stupid things and there's still quite a lot of hand-holding required to get to a working chip.
> After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic.
Is this common? When I try out new AI tools, even as person who is financially independent, I load up maybe 10-20 USD worth of tokens, and if I don't get anything working from that, I literally give up and don't continue trying. If it can't do anything useful like "place a simple component on the schematic" after ~10 USD of expenditure, is it really worth continue adding more money into the platform? Seems DOA in those cases.
I used company money on it. I was hoping I could massage it along enough to get a workable test fixture out of it. I wanted to put together a simple hardware-in-the-loop tester for a component of our product.
Someone should’ve told these guys: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337328
I tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.
All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost there, just one more token, bro" that makes it addictive.
That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation.
If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term.
Gambling addicts make all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations for why they are actually up, if you think about it. "Well, if you consider my entertainment, I'm actually up." "Well, if you think of all the drinks I got comped, I'm actually up." Even worse are the ones who talk about runs, "I was up $10,000 at one point." Nevermind they gave it all back and another $20k chasing that first $10k. At the end of the day, if they had just gone to the movies instead, they'd have more money on their pocket.
Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant". There will be arguments all day long about how these affairs are technically possible and quite lucrative if everything goes according to plan. But the reality is that vanishly few people are equipped to identify and stick to the right plan. Reality meeting theory.
I've told my developers they can use agentic coding if they want, but they must never mention it in the course of development. Not because I don't want to know, but because it's not going to change my evaluation of "their" work. If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care? But if it breaks the build or does something stupid and they don't understand it, it's going to be a bad day for them, whether they wrote it themselves or copied it out of StackOverflow or had Gemini do it.
Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.
I am actually up all the drinks I got comped in Vegas. I sit down at the penny slots and bet one penny one row until I get offered a free drink. I tip the server $3, bet two more pennies for good measure, get up, and walk out with the drink in my hand. I just got like a $3.10 Manhattan for walking around the strip, including tip, courtesy of some business that was low-key trying to scam me and deserves to have less money than they do.
The casino runs the probabilies on the customers too. You get the Manhattan because it, on average, gives them a return.
They probably aren't making a loss on the $3.10 Manhatten either.
If they cannot mention it how do you know that they have not taken up the offer?
I agree that people will rationalise being in a losing situation as a winning situation. That does not change the fact that winning situations can exist.
They can't talk about it during the code review. Basically, "no excuses." We talk about what we're doing otherwise.
> I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
I literally did this yesterday with solid results using Codex CLI. I used xhigh thinking and gpt 5.5.
I had it use KiCad directly via cli rather than via MCP, and I did make Claude Opus review it's work after every round. I got what I think will be a working revision A in about 10 hours of tinkering spread over a few days.
> Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now.
Would some sort of constraint-solving algorithm help with that? Something like (but not necessarily) Cassowary[0]? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by placement though; I don't have much domain knowledge in PCBs / electronics.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362528
I've written my own autoplacer/autorouter. Placement is where you put the components on the board, routing is how you shape the traces to interconnect them.
It does a pretty decent job on small hobby-project boards of ~40 components (which is my use case at the moment), and I'm working part-time in the background on scaling it further.
The resulting designs pass all the KiCad electrical and geometry checks. Granted, I've spent about a year working on this problem, and it's hard, but not that hard a problem, providing you can avoid falling off the exponential cliff by decomposing it into hierarchical subproblems.
Quick-and-dirty unsupervised whole-board synthesis from schematic takes about 5 minutes, longer if you want cleaner output with nicer-looking better-routed traces.
As others here have said, placing is the real problem to solve, and that's where the magic happens. Place the components right, and routing is a relatively easy loosely-coupled constraint programming problem, place them wrongly, and you will have to get used to seeing the word UNFEASIBLE in your log output.
This project sounds very cool. Is it open source? If yes, can you share a link to the repo?
As an electrical engineer who has tried to use it multiple times, I think Flux is an absolutely awful product. No surprise at all that they want to sweep details about their “intellectual property, commercial traction and user base” under the rug.
Yeah this stuff isn't even realistic as well.
A number of years ago I was working on something professionally and there was a problem. Only about 1 in 5 boards assembled wouldn't crash the CPU. After much debugging it turned out one of the ICs had an open collector output and it wasn't loaded correctly with a pull up resistor. This caused a cascading failure, held the bus up when initialising the hardware which hit the WDT and reset the CPU over and over again.
If you aren't there designing the thing in the first place, you never read the datasheets, never drew the schematic, never placed the components and thus don't know where to look when something goes wrong. And it does go wrong. And then you're in deep shit.
I worry about people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't.
Everything you said is exactly the proper argument against vibe coding.
If you can’t or don’t entirely go over the output, the failure mode is invisible.
Vibe coding is certainly the main part of it. But another problem is how deep our software and hardware stacks are. There is too much information to retain to solve problems now.
Flux just got funding from Bain and others, and it feels like Adafruit was preparing a post about it. Maybe they contacted Flux to confirm some info and they freaked out?
I can't find in archive.org if they had a previous post about it.
Also, seems like there a good bunch of complains in Reddit about Flux and its billing...
https://old.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/1t476x4/warning_fluxai...
Note that this is not related to Black Forest Labs Flux, the image synthesis models builders, and is instead related to a PCB AI authoring product called Flux.ai.
Also not related to https://fluxkeyboard.com/
Nor f.lux, the warm light software that got Sherlocked by every major OS.
https://justgetflux.com/
> Time to shine
Nor is this Flux the display warmth app
Thanks, that name was indeed making me wonder what's going on with the BFL people. :)
Exactly, these vectors point in very different directions!
> Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration
Does anyone have some more context about what happened here? An uncharitable analogy might be that I misconfigured my front door by not locking it, which doesn't give someone the right to walk in and look around - but I have no idea what Adafruit is specifically being accused of doing.
Had no idea about this. Now I do.
Thank you, lawyers. If you ever find yourself out of work use this as your reference to pivot to advertisement
Streisand in full effect!
It's super effective!
hi everyone, phil and limor here, any questions for now, email press@adafruit.com
limor and i are very much looking forward to telling our story.
It might be being suggested in that statement, but to me that reads that there's a potential opportunity there for a delayed AMA on this?
That if people were to email press@adafruit.com with a subject line (for example) of 'FLUX - AMA for later', these questions could be rounded up and the responses could then go onto a Adafruit blog page later, when and if applicable?
limor and phil here, we would 100% welcome it, looking forward to telling our story very soon - pt & limor
I'm curious, but I'm not sure if you can say - has Adafruit ever published anything about Flux?
You should read the linked article
I have, and the article does not in any way address my question. You also seem to be a brand new user, so in case you're not aware, HN guidelines say to refrain from mentioning whether or not someone has read the link.
As a long time reader I keep wondering how it is more conductive to the discourse to comment without reading than to point that the answers might be in the article someone ignored.
Just reply with a quote from the article. They will understand they did not read carefully, and you can avoid the low-value 'read the article' snark (that might be false since often it is not actually in the article when somebody does that).
My question wasn't "how to handle that better". I hope it's okay to point it out :)
I would also argue it's not "often" the case someone asking the obvious question seemingly answered in the article had actually read it. It happens, surely, but it's not a rule of thumb.
That's too meta for a thread here anyways, I think.
It's an in-actionable "question" / comment. The rule does not claim one thing is better than the other. One is easily enforceable, the other is indemonstrable. If the point of this exchange is to better understand and use HN, the reason is because it is not hard to be constructive instead of throwing out non sequiturs.
And I didn't say it's '"often" the case someone asking the obvious question seemingly answered in the article had actually read it'. I said the person pointing it out while refusing to provide receipts or cordially engage is often wrong about what they think is obviously in the article. It's worthless noise regardless.
Looks like Flux.ai got some publicity out of this. Maybe not the kind they wanted - after reading this thread, I'll sure never give them a dime.
Struck a nerve, but I wouldn’t back down. If they do take you to court, there’s this wonderful thing called discovery.
From what I can tell, the message is
When you discover an exploit, only communicate with source (and pray they respond) or get sued. Seems like the position is customers and stakeholders shouldn't be allowed access to this information.
Seems similar to what Microsoft is doing lately:
https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/microsoft-doubles...
That's actually very common even with respected bug bounty programs. Communicating exploits to anyone else (let alone the general public) will at the very least make you ineligible for rewards.
> Adafruit’s reporting concerns a matter of public security interest and was conducted in the ordinary course of responsible disclosure
What's the context here?
It seems there's suspiciously little context available, yet here I also am commenting on a 'vaguepost'. I wonder if one day AI will be able to filter out vagueposts from my browser along with ragebait and curiosity gap headlines.
If AI does that it’ll make us 10x readers
Indeed, however:
Bold of you to assume my reading ability is that high.
It's deliberately written that way, by lawyers who are making sure they (Adafruit) won't accidentaly admit to something they didn't.
Best I can tell they've taken down whatever it was, but most likely flux left some ways to get data out of their system that shouldn't have been and Adafruit leveraged that. Could have been in a good way like exposing false claims of architecture or security, or a bad way like revealing proprietary information on how the platform worked or looking at other peoples' projects (more than just seeing they could do that). If the blog doesn't come back up, I'll kinda assume they did something bad. I don't have sources but I've heard adafruit isn't the sweetest fruit in the tree...
For anyone that has been missing the memo on how to become rich:
1. Make a slop machine that's a wrapper around another slop machine like claude, openai, google or whatever.
2. Hire a lawyer to send threatening emails to anyone that might call you out.
3. Get a few investors that are completely clueless to throw a ton of cash at you for having ai in your product.
4. Profit.
Honestly, get a hold of Louis Rossmann, this shit needs to stop.
Had anyone tried AutoPCB (https://autopcb.app/) instead?
Seems especially useful when paired with an agentic coding tool!
Yep, and it’s terrible
Not only did it burn a 100$ failing but it did so in a very untransparent way.
I bought a 20 dollar plan but they snuck a 100$ billed usage into the billing agreements next thing I know the agent as used the quote going in circles and my card is billed.
We need outcome based billing...
I don't want to pay for a service that doesn't deliver.
I’m so sick of this that I go to the trouble to set up prepaid cards to pay for these things now.
A handful of honest participants like DeepSeek are pay as you go instead of trying to sneakily bill you for usage.
Never heard of Flux.ai before. It seems to be a 3D circuit designer with 'AI'.
Not sure what the issue between them and Adafruit is. However, people over on Reddit¹ claim that Flux.ai is a little bit scummy. They push users into a beginner trial ($5/month) and then silently charge for usage per token - up to $100 per month.
Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Adafruit products, including footprints, symbols, datasheets, and simulation models"². I wonder whether they designed these themselves or whether they use existing ones. Could not easily find licenses info.
¹) https://www.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/18o5zfo/thoughts_on_fl...
²) https://www.flux.ai/sitemap/manufacturers/adafruit
Why do we tolerate this bullying and misconduct from companies that harms us and progress overall? Is there really no solution in this day and age for harmful behavior and aggression and hostility like what it looks like Flux is doing here? I can't believe we don't have an answer, I think it's just that the bad guys are drowning us in noise and making it hard for us to identify the solutions where we band together a la David v Goliath against them.
I previously had a passing interest in Flux, now I'm certain it's a fraud.
Flux.ai offers a PCB design solution which is a clear interest for Adafruit. Anyone have any idea what this is about?
Suing the industry won't win them customers/friends.
I suspect they don't care. Their only goal is likely to get enough good PR to sell to some big tech or AI company for an absurd valuation.
>The letter further asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration
A confession
They vibe coded their system and it showed Adafruit something? Or showed some information with trivial prodding? Sounds like your average cross-tenant leak. Maybe showing more than intended or some caching issue. Many options some not really not fault of Adafruit.
Or someone found server.domain/path/subdirectory/resourceX and was like "shit, I was hoping to find resourceY but I can't find a link to it, I wonder if I just click in my address bar and change the X to a Y", and voila, resourceY is right there.
To some of us, this is elementary navigation. Like going up the stairs if the elevator is out. Often it's faster than waiting for the damn elevator, too.
To others, it's cybarrrr-criiiimeeee!!!!!!11111one
I don't know the details of the case, but what they worded there is a textbook unauthorized intrusion and a naïve teenager "the door was open" defense.
Mind you there can be nuances, but that quote is like saying "I took their stuff, but it was poking out of their pocket."
It is bit grey area. You are evaluating something. Do some basic checks. Actually end up seeing something you should not. You stop and tell them to fix it. They then silence you.
Now it is bit questionable should you check things like this during evaluation or not. Strict legal reading probably not. With reasonable customer relations you thank them and put it on top of the priority list. Unless they clearly enumerated everything they got their hands on or tried to run more real scans.